"Spundge is the end-to-end tool for today's power curator. Connect with the best content creators on the web. Collaboratively curate the web and create relevant, influential content.

- Discover and Filter:

Create a Spundge Notebook to stay on top of a topic, person, company or interest. Spundge Notebooks deliver a stream of relevant content from news sources, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Flickr. Filter and then save the best of what you discover.

- Curate and Collaborate:

Invite friends and colleagues to collaborate on Notebooks and discover and save new items. Collaborators receive notifications when new content is saved, and can add comments to Notebook items. Collaborative Curation enables you to track information, while instantly sharing with friends and colleagues.

- Stream and Publish:

Transform your Notebook into a real-time stream you can embed anywhere on the web. Share what you’re reading, or curate a real-time newswire about a breaking event or topic of interest.

- Get Spundge PRO:

it enables teams and individuals to collaboratively create content and instantly publish to a CMS, email newsletter and social accounts. Writing in Spundge lets you drag and drop images, tweets and videos into any story, effortlessly add attribution, and easily embed and track content."

From review article on Nieman Journalism Lab:

"The problem is today’s journalist has to use too many products and applications to do their job, and very few of these were actually built with newsrooms or journalistic workflow in mind...

Spundge is a platform that’s built to take a journalist from information discovery and tracking all the way to publishing, regardless of whatever internal systems they have to contend with...

The software is free, but an optional $9 monthly fee adds premium features, including the ability to share notebooks with collaborators, who can also add to the notebook and see changes in real time..."

It's interesting to see that content curation is evolving from an opportunity to a necessity as communication shifts from traditional methods (PR, advertising, old-style SEO...) to new ones (content marketing, inbound marketing, social media...). In this new world of communication many things have changed and professionals or companies who want to get heard need to consider this question:

Do people listen to you because they have to or because they want to?

As my friend Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, puts it in his latest book, Curate This, we can't rely anymore on captive audiences. Consumers filter out spammy messages which is why, to be heard, we have to curate or die.

He said that this type of communication counts for nothing regarding academic advancement and added that writing another paper and having it published in a journal no one reads or a chapter in an expensive book no one will buy is considered worthwhile.

"I read recently that content curation is dead. I have a few different arguments against this concept, but for now, I’ll keep it short and sweet: Content curation is not dead, and while the debate over curating content online vs creating new content will rage on and on, curating content for other reasons is still going strong.

That said, there are a lot of different ways to go about content curation, so we’ve test driven a few different tools so you can figure out which might work best for you whether you’re curating content for work projects, assigning it as a school project, for your own professional development, or personal interests."

I'm rescooping this for three reasons. First, the term "curation" is fairly new to me and it is nice to see how different forms it can take. Secondly, I read so many blogposts entitled "10 tools for this" or "35 reasons for that". It is nice too see one of those where all of the 6 tools are actually great. Third, the fact that I actually have experience with three of the six tools makes me feel good. So enjoy :)

When I had the 5 I needed I explained to the room that these 5 people were now curators. Each curator would be responsible for one big idea and I wanted them to curate 10 good small ideas around that single big idea. I stressed this wasn’t a brainstorm and that quality of ideas was more valuable than quantity but that I did need 10 ideas for each. The business target for me was to get 50 small ideas.

I clearly stated these curators were now in control and the most powerful people in the room – I was implicitly handing the control in this part of the session to them. This is a core part of the 50 big ideas – releasing the control as a L&D professional and letting people get on with it. As a curator I was expecting them to aggregate ideas and conversation, sift and sort ideas, filter out what would work and which would not, collaborate with each other, to work together to achieve the expected result of 50 good small ideas.

I specifically asked for curators. If we’re to move from the L&D professional of old to the new role of performance support we need to understand how to curate, market, negotiate and question.

Are content curation and the future of search converging? Who will you trust when it comes to find out what alternatives to a problem are out there and you have only an Internet connection? How much individual freedom do you want

If you don’t manage your online presence, you are allowing search engines to create it for you.

Take control. In a nutshell, if you do not have a clear online presence, you are allowing Google, Yahoo, and Bing to create your identity for you. As a Lifehacker post on this topic once noted: "You want search engine queries to direct to you and your accomplishments, not your virtual doppelgangers."

We're excited to launch the newest version of our special sauce - the Scoop.it Smart Suggestion Engine. It brings you the most relevant and most popular content on your topic and learns your preferences along the way.

In their seminal report, Our Cultural Commonwealth (2006), the American Council of Learned Societies underscored the need for scholars engaged in digital humanities work to leverage their access to data both to expand their audience to the general public and to generate new research questions. "Now is the Future Now?" argues that the progress made in digital humanities toward these goals has depended and will depend not only on digital data, but also on their appropriate curation. The article defines digital humanities, data, so-called Big Data, and digital curation. Next it examines digital curation initiatives in the sciences and in the humanities that occurred before the release of Our Cultural Commonwealth. It then considers and evaluates the digital curation work undertaken in the sciences and in the humanities after the report’s publication. In theory and in practice digital curation has benefited substantially from practices developed and tested first in the natural sciences and subsequently adapted for and extended in the humanities. Finally, the piece explores the future work necessary to facilitate symbiosis between digital curation and digital humanities. Collaboration and cooperation, transcending geographical, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries, data sharing, policies and planning, education and training, sustainability — all remain pressing issues in 2013.

Tumblr is one of the newer social media apps that allow free sharing of digital media over the web. It is a social channel that has not been left isolated by the educators, as more and more teachers turn to utilizing methods of using this app in their classrooms.

If you are a teacher and want to take advantage of this app, here are a few ways in which you can use Tumblr to bring a whole new life to your classroom:

This great article shows how we can use Tumblr in our classrooms. I love the suggestion of a quick and easy website or hosting an online debate. They also point out that we need to protect kids online, but they need experience to learn how to do this - Tumblr could be a good way to do this :0)

“Curation is a life skill and an important part of being digitally literate. Educators need to know how to curate information so they can teach students how they can curate content for research, their interests and passion. As part of this process educators need to encourage students to curate information using techniques that address their own personal learning needs.”
Via Dennis T OConnor

We introduce content curation using both Diigo and Scoop.it in our E-Learning for Educators class. It's our firm belief that online teachers must be information fluent and that they teach those skills to their online students.

We also see these skills as a strong foundation for building personal learning networks.

You come across a lot of stuff, find some of them valuable, find value in some parts, and you see connections between the different stuff you come across. You curate by filtering, extracting, and bringing out the connection between the stuff you find, and this curated new stuff becomes more valuable than those already shared stuff that you found. Valuable enough to be shared to others who are looking for similar stuff as you are.

A Japanese news-recommendation app called SmartNews that mines Twitter for topical content has raised $36 million and says it plans to use those funds to expand into North America and take on Flipboard

"OK…so let me clarify that title. I honestly think textbooks are on their way out…or at least I hope they are. Really it should read “Flipboard as core curation artifact for classrooms” but that wouldn’t have you here reading now would it. "

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.